SXSW Keynote: Bob Geldof
Austin Convention Center, Thursday, March 17Like an angry old professor exhorting his young charges to wake up and smell the (in)action, Bob Geldof delivered a passionate discourse on the death of rock & roll Thursday morning. Toggling between memoir and polemic, the Boomtown Rat-turned-humanitarian wondered aloud whether rock music would ever recapture the social capital it had during the time span between Little Richard and the Sex Pistols. As a kid growing up in economically devastated postwar Ireland, Geldof found a lifeline in the music blaring on Radio Luxembourg. “Boys and girls with guitars were articulating other universes and other possibilities,” Geldof recalled. “Rock & roll was the rhetoric and instrument of that change.” It’d be easy enough to dismiss such sentiments as standard autumnal nostalgia if not for Geldof’s assertion that rock music also distilled and exported America’s most liberating ideals to the rest of the planet. “It is your great cultural gift to the world,” he said, “but it may be over.” In the course of his hourlong keynote, Geldof barely touched on the Live Aid era he spearheaded, calling the 1985 concert benefiting African famine victims a “little spaceship” in the materialistic 1980s. In his view, the hyper-democratic promise of emerging technologies has only exacerbated the disconnect between song and society. “When I see people queuing for an iPad, I despair,” he said. “It’s a fucking piece of metal!” What technology can’t replicate is that which makes Geldof cry when he hears the boys choir practicing at Canterbury Cathedral on a Friday night. “The articulation of sense and soul must be the supreme achievement of the human being,” he posited. Reduce that to “continental navel-gazing” and we risk irrelevancy while squandering the opportunity to inspire something better. For this (among other things), the crowd wasted no time in giving Geldof a standing ovation.
This article appears in March 18 • 2011.
